Heavy is the Crown
by Jayne Foyer
Summary: They are nearing the end of their war, so they rebel the one way they have left. The end comes, mundane and inevitable, the way cullings always do. Alpha timeline.


Title from Rose and Dave's first pesterlog. Alpha timeline, obviously.

* * *

They fuck in a swimming pool.

Her swimming pool, actually. There are fewer people around, generally fewer break-ins and paparazzi and whatnot. It's not as shiny and brassy and loud as his. Her place is classy and quiet and in the backwoods of upstate New York, a little bit Fallingwater. It's fall and kind of chilly outside, but the pool is heated. He presses her against the stairs in the hot tub and fucks her, while their hands roam over one another's bodies, close and intimate and both, he thinks, praying.

She hangs on to him, arms around his neck, chin at his shoulder. His hips thrust into her and he turns his head and breathes on her ear, panting slightly, his hands holding her around her waist, dipping down to her ass. The water splishes and splashes and is louder than they are, than their little grunts and breaths. She presses her lips against his shoulder and he kisses her neck.

He comes, shuddering into her. They don't move for a moment, acutely aware of the act of rebellion they've committed. It's bullshit and they both know, she did the research and everything, but he hopes maybe that the warmth of the pool, the water that leaked inside of her, might help. Might guide a living strand of DNA into a fruit waiting to seed, might fill a barren womb and ignite a wary spark. She also knows that it's not going to happen because she hasn't had her period in six years, but a part of her still hopes. A part of her is always hoping.

He lets her go and lies back for a minute, his chest rising and falling with the rhythm of his lungs emptying and filling, gushing air in and out through his delicate windpipe. She pulls herself out of the water, still dangling her feet and shins in, a hand hovering delicately between her legs. She touches herself a little bit, rolls a nipple between her fingers, but her hands are tired and she gives up, closing her eyes, leaning back. A mouth on her breast. She opens her eyes, and Dave's pressing himself between her legs, his lips at the height of her chest. His fingers go to work. She moans, the first true noise she's made tonight, after they drunk the bottle of wine and took off their clothes. Her muscles clench, her thighs tighten around his torso, and he kisses her so she cries out into his mouth.

He finally lets her go, and she lays there, outside of the pool, hardly moving. He grins and steps back, then gets onto the little slippery wall dividing the hot tub from the rest of the pool. It's cold outside, and she watches the shiver go down his body.

"Fuck you," he screams, and she thinks she sees crows flying out of trees in the distance. She laughs a little. He turns around and grins at her. "Fuck you," he says lovingly, and then he spreads his arms out, his yellow hair a glowing halo in the fading evening night, and he falls through the air gracefully, into the big pool, disappearing underwater.

Rose sits up again, slides into the hot tub, lowers her head, submerged until her nose. She stops at the little dip in the dividing wall, and when he surfaces, it's right there, and they're staring at each other from across the short mosaic plane.

They don't kiss again. She doesn't say anything about loving him, neither does he for her. It's not about that anymore, and that's something they committed to a long time ago. This isn't about them. This is war. This is revolt. This is protest, civil disobedience, a revolutionary act. A declaration.

We will not be controlled, it says, and it says, We will try to make babies exactly when and how we want to.

She gets out first, takes a shower, gets dressed, goes inside and makes hot chocolate and pours vodka in it straight and goes to her computer, gets back to work, type type typing away. His shower lasts longer than hers and she can hear him talking on the phone with his manager when he gets out, stubbornly arguing, refusing to compromise. _I am a creative genius, man. I won't be censored. You tell her that for me._

He comes downstairs, finally, in a tux with the bowtie loose and sunglasses, still drying his hair with a little towel. He says, "See you next week, Rose," and drapes the towel on the rail of her stairs and picks up his bag and leaves. She hears the car leave.

They both deny everything to the press, which only launches more rumors. They aren't seen in public together until they are, and he holds a door open for her and they go into a restaurant together for a few hours and the media explodes. They rented out the whole restaurant and what they really did is played scrabble over ice-cream sundaes, but nobody has to know that.

It's Sunday and instead of the pool they're on her stairs. He stopped her before they got down all the way and asked her if she'd ever tried it there. It's pretty uncomfortable but they soldier through it. Once they finish, she lays upside-down on the stairs for a while and he lies opposite of her, their heads beside each other. She starts to cry, and he kisses the tears off her cheeks. There will be no fruit in her dusty womb, no life budding there, no second heartbeat inside of her, drinking in her nutrients. She knows and so does he. But they have been stripped and broken and there are no more other ways to rebel.

They take a shower together and he's gentler this time. She touches his face, his forehead, as if anointing him. He doesn't come inside of her, and she watches the semen disappear with the water, down into the drain, and she feels envy in her belly.

They get dressed separately. She looks in the mirror and thinks about cutting all her hair off. She is tired. She has been fighting for a very long time, and her books have stopped selling. Too many people have died.

The doorbell rings. She doesn't move at first.

She's in the front hall when she hears him. "_Rose? Don't answer that. Rose?_" She can hear him coming down the stairs. She can see a silhouette of whoever is at the door through the frosted glass. She thinks, This is how it ends. There are no great battles. No anguished cries of troops waging war on my behalf. I am not a General, or a great President or any kind of leader. There are no heroic deaths. My hair is still damp and I am not wearing shoes.

"Rose-"

Neither of them say anything, the blood frozen like sludge in their veins.

Her fishy eyes, round and black and glassy, glide over them. The face splits into a grin, revealing dozens of rows of teeth, like a shark. Dave has something to say and he pulls Rose out of the way and starts to scream, so she kills him first, just like that. He falls on the floor of Rose's home, on the hardwood floor that she's cleaned since seven months ago, when they had sex right there. She remembers every second of it.

Rose spits blood before she can try to fix it. She lowers herself to her knees and tugs on the blade a little. It breaks, pathetic and poorly made. A queen would never waste anything of value on scum like him.

She leans over him and, for some reason, something inside her ignites, and she has to put her lips on his. The urge rises in her belly and she thinks, fearfully, if she can just kiss him-

The alien takes hold of her body and tries to pull her away. She starts to scream, struggles. She needs to kiss him. If she can just kiss him-

The prongs pierce straight through her body, and pain shoots into every nerve. Blood begins to fill her lungs. She falls. Her eyes are on the Condesce herself, come to kill them humbly, no pomp or circumstances, only she and them and the place where they fucked.

She leaves them.

Rose can still move. She reaches out with one hand. She takes hold of Dave's. She closes her eyes.

_Heavy is the crown._


End file.
